Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems. Personal use only; do not redistribute.
Chapter
ne of the keys to creating effective servlets is understanding how to
manipulate the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Getting a
O
thorough grasp of this protocol is not an esoteric, theoretical topic,
but rather a practical issue that can have an immediate impact on the perfor 
mance and usability of your servlets. This chapter discusses the HTTP infor 
mation that is sent from the browser to the server in the form of request
headers. It explains each of the HTTP 1.1 request headers, summarizing how
and why they would be used in a servlet. The chapter also includes three
detailed examples: listing all request headers sent by the browser, reducing
download time by encoding the Web page with gzip when appropriate, and
establishing password based access control for servlets. 
Note that HTTP request headers are distinct from the form data dis 
cussed in the previous chapter. Form data results directly from user input
and is sent as part of the URL for 
GET
 requests and on a separate line for
POST
 requests. Request headers, on the other hand, are indirectly set by the
browser and are sent immediately following the initial 
GET
 or 
POST
 request
line. For instance, the following example shows an HTTP request that
might result from submitting a book search request to a servlet at
http://www.somebookstore.com/search
. The request includes the head 
ers 
Accept
, 
Accept Encoding
, 
Connection
, 
Cookie
, 
Host
, 
Referer
, and
User Agent
, all of which might be important to the operation of the serv 
let, but none of which can be derived from the form data or deduced auto 
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